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> Automation moving more people to such jobs I don't think the set of possible jobs is limited to either existing jobs, or in particular waiters and Walmart gr

> Automation moving more people to such jobs I don't think the set of possible jobs is limited to either existing jobs, or in particular waiters and Walmart greeters. That's kind of the point. We invent new jobs all the time. Won't we come up with jobs that cannot be automated, or that we'd rather be performed by humans? > Assuming the jobless people will have less income than if they worked Well, that's more of a tautology than an assumption, and fails to engage with the scenario highlighted above. The point is that people will get other "jobs." (I put it in quotation marks because I'm pretty sure that people will get paid to do things we'd never thought of as "jobs" at some point). Of course, S&D still works the same way. But human desire is pretty much infinite, and we can always come up with new jobs and new markets. The idea that all of them will be desirably automateable seems unproven to me.

PeterisP 10y ago
What's preventing those new jobs from being done right now? We already have all these unlimited needs and infinite desires right now, but we aren't willing to pay a minimum wage for them at the moment or we would be doing so. Also, there clearly are all kinds of personal services possible which are bought by a few of the rich but not en masse - there is not a demand for them, and for the average person probably cannot be, i.e. if a service is nice but people would value 1 man-hour spent on it as 0.99 man-hours of their time, then that service can ever be in demand only for a wealthier-than-average minority. Yes, it's possible that some new habits will create some new professions in time, however, for the short term (e.g. the next 5 years) such new occupations won't create millions of jobs (e.g. because unless right now millions of people would be preparing for them, the people won't be ready so soon) while automation will put millions of people out of these jobs. Who knows to what equilibrium it will come out eventually, but in the short term the labor supply will be dominating over demand and the price (and perceived value) of labor will continue to fall.

PeterisP 10y ago

What's preventing those new jobs from being done right now? We already have all these unlimited needs and infinite desires right now, but we aren't willing to pay a minimum wage for them at the moment or we would be doing so. Also, there clearly are all kinds of personal services possible which are bought by a few of the rich but not en masse - there is not a demand for them, and for the average person probably cannot be, i.e. if a service is nice but people would value 1 man-hour spent on it as 0.99 man-hours of their time, then that service can ever be in demand only for a wealthier-than-average minority. Yes, it's possible that some new habits will create some new professions in time, however, for the short term (e.g. the next 5 years) such new occupations won't create millions of jobs (e.g. because unless right now millions of people would be preparing for them, the people won't be ready so soon) while automation will put millions of people out of these jobs. Who knows to what equilibrium it will come out eventually, but in the short term the labor supply will be dominating over demand and the price (and perceived value) of labor will continue to fall.